Self-Driving Volvo Cars Testing on City Streets in Gothenburg

Google’s autonomous testing moves from the highway to the city

Volvo has been hard at work on developing and testing autonomous cars for quite some time now, but the automaker is proud to finally announce that the first group of self-driving cars is already navigating around the city of Gothenburg in Sweden.
“The test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption and merging traffic all by themselves," said Erik Coelingh, Technical Specialist at Volvo Car Group in a press release. This phase is an important stepping stone towards the automaker's "Drive Me" project which not involves Volvo, but also legislators, transport authorities, the city, and customers. Customers have been participating by actually driving the test cars on 31 miles of selected routes in and around Gothenburg. There are 100 test cars in total, and all of them boast the Autopilot technology.Autopilot does exactly what its name suggests - it takes care of all the driving functions, and the automaker reports that the tech has been performing well. While this testing phase appears to be going according to plan, Volvo hopes the test cars will eventually be able to complete the entire test route in highly autonomous mode, and at the rate it's going, we doubt that'll take much longer.
Gothenburg isn't the only city with autonomous cars driving around. Google also reports its first batch of autonomous cars is testing on city streets in Mountain View, Calif. Since there are many more objects in the city that can present a danger, Google says one mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of highway driving. To help prepare the self-driving cars for the city, the company improved its software so that it can distinctly detect numerous hazards, allowing it to differentiate between a pedestrian, bus, stop sign, or cyclist. Google was able to program the software to think like this only after logging several miles and encountering "thousands of different situations." Check out how the Google cars perform in the city by watching the video below.Source: Volvo, Google

I think if Volvo and Google was able to bring this technology to public transportation then they would have a large golden egg. I'm just happy to see that one of the safest automakers is taking the lead on something that sounds incredibly risky.